Research Engineer
Sesame
San Francisco, CA · $190k–$320k a year · Posted June 17, 2026
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Where San Francisco, CA ranks
Where San Francisco, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #1Best cities for security jobs316 openings · of 20
- #1Best cities for technology jobs7,178 openings · of 100
- #1Best cities for financial services pay after cost of living$173k · of 33
- #1Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills35% · of 100
- #1Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills in the West Coast35% · of 54
- #1Cities with the most jobs that do not need a four-year degree in the West Coast902 jobs · of 47
Rankings about engineering jobs
- Best cities for software and engineering jobs #1 San Francisco (3,412 openings)
- Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living #1 San Mateo ($216k)
- Most requested AI skills in engineering jobs #1 AI tools in daily work (6.1%)
- AI tools named most often in engineering jobs #1 Claude (1.7%)
- Employers with the most engineering jobs #1 Amazon (2,992 roles)
Pay compared with the market
This listing pays about $255,000 a year. Across 40 open research engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $190,000 to $280,000 and the median is $250,000. That is inside the middle half of those listings, 2% above the median.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
How AI is used in this kind of work
AI use among mechanical engineers is little observed so far. Measured exposure for mechanical engineers: 8% (little observed).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Skills this job asks for
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About the job
About Sesame
Sesame believes in a future where computers are lifelike - with the ability to see, hear, and collaborate with us in ways that feel natural and human. With this vision, we're designing a new kind of computer, focused on making voice agents part of our daily lives. Our team brings together founders from Oculus and Ubiquity6, alongside proven leaders from Meta, Google, and Apple, with deep expertise spanning hardware and software. Join us in shaping a future where computers truly come alive.
ABOUT THE ROLE
New and novel approaches are needed to realize all of our product goals. As a Research engineer at Sesame, you are a research-oriented person with experience in. You are up to date on recent papers and approaches and you have the creativity and the intuition to come up with new solutions based on the application at hand.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Design, build, and ship novel architectures and models to production.
- Scale LLM training and inference, improving latency, throughput, and cost.
- Build robust training and evaluation pipelines.
- Develop tooling for safe, versioned, privacy-aware dataset curation and discovery.
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Strong, hands-on experience with PyTorch.
- Solid software engineering skills and a genuine interest in ML, with experience writing production code across the stack.
- Practical experience training or fine-tuning LLMs, and a good understanding of how LLM training algorithms work.
- Experience designing evaluation metrics and harnesses that reflect real user experience.
- Familiarity with the ML lifecycle: dataset operations, training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, deployment, and monitoring.
- Experience shipping complex projects to production, ideally user-facing or online ML systems, and adapting as requirements change.
- Good judgment about when to work independently and when to bring in teammates.
- Experience contributing to technical direction, building consensus, and working well with product, infrastructure, and research partners.
Sesame is committed to a workplace where everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered. We welcome all qualified applicants, embracing diversity in race, gender, identity, orientation, ability, and more. We provide reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. Contact careers@sesame.com for assistance.
Full-time Employee Benefits:
- 401 (k) max employer match: 3.5% of compensation
- 100% employer-paid health, vision, and dental benefits for you and your dependents
- Unlimited PTO and sick time
- Flexible spending account with employer matching up to $1,650/year (medical FSA)
- Guardian Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
- Opportunity to share in the company's success with competitive stock options
Benefits do not apply to contingent/contract workers.